Driven by Ideas: Some Archaeological Investigations of Early Medieval Transitions, lecture by Martin Carver (University of York), Harvard University, Barker Center, April 2, 2019, 5:00 pm
Professor Carver’s lecture concerns recent research in the European early Middle Ages, reviewing his previously published work on Sutton Hoo and Portmahomack, newly-published work on Britain as a whole, and work currently in progress in Sicily. Each of these was (or is) primarily an exercise in archaeological investigation, attempting to explain what happened to people when their regime changed. Our ability to deduce this from material culture has increased notably over the last thirty years, and the story is partly one of how archaeology, bioarchaeology and especially biomolecular archaeology have kept pace with our ambitions and occasionally overtaken them. Although different kinds of archaeology (settlement, burial and monumentality for example) often report different attitudes and behaviors, these do occasionally converge. In the case of Britain, we see a changing emphasis on lordship, spirituality or wealth creation in different parts of the island from the fifth to the eleventh century. In Sicily, changes in regime are more thoroughly documented, and their applications also appear to have been ideologically driven. Here, however, we may be in a better position to distinguish the experiences of the ‘people without history’— farmers, merchants and their families. Their lives seem to have run a different course, and moved at a different pace, from those of government, but in some fashion must nevertheless have been determinant.
Martin Carver was an officer in the British Army before practising as a freelance archaeologist for thirteen years and serving as professor of archaeology at the University of York for over two decades, retiring in 2008. A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he was the editor of the journal Antiquity from 2002 until 2012. He has carried out fieldwork and research in Britain, Italy, France and Algeria, including the excavations of the major Pictish monastery at Portmahomack and the most recent round of Sutton Hoo digs and analyses. He currently is the director (with Alessandra Molinari and Girolamo Fiorentino) of the monumental Sicily in Transition project, which investigates the material, social, and economic history of the island from the seventh through thirteenth centuries CE. In addition to numerous excavation reports, he is the author of Archaeological Investigation (2009), Making Archaeology Happen (2011), Sutton Hoo: Encounters with Early England (2017), and Formative Britain: An Archeology of Britain, Fifth to Eleventh Century CE (2019).
This event is part of the 2019 Harvard Medieval Material Culture Series: The View from the Trenches: Archaeology and Medieval Studies Today. In its fifth iteration, the annual Harvard Medieval Material Culture Series is intended as an interdisciplinary research forum for the study of the middle ages. This year the theme is Medieval Archaeology.
As part of the Medieval Material Culture Series, Professor Carver will also be leading a seminar for undergraduate and graduate students: Wearing Wealth: A Discussion about Social Change from Clothing to Coinage. The seminar will take place in the Sackler Building, Seminar Room 323, on April 3 from 6:00–7:00 pm.
The questions to be introduced in this seminar are how and why the indications of wealth changed in England between the sixth to ninth century. The story line is broadly as follows: in sixth century Britain, people invested in their personal appearance, in weapons, brooches and especially in textiles. Similar attention was given to dressing their horses. The Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have the lion’s share of the material, but the ethos appears to be shared with the Britons, Picts and Irish too, where wealth was reckoned in cattle and stored in cattle hides; but clothing was also a crucial signal.
At the end of the seventh century, there was a gradual change in emphasis from apparel to treasure, as indicated by the Sutton Hoo burials, the Staffordshire Hoard and the late female furnished mound burials. In this same period, Christianity was redefined as an institution – in the north and west largely monastic, in the south and east largely episcopal- and wealth was also redefined in two ways: in the English areas, investment was in large buildings, grand farms and wheat as a cash crop; in the (more spiritual) Celtic areas in sculpture and illuminated books.
Coins were made and hoarded in the seventh century too (as gold), but only after the ninth century was the incipient nation monetized (in silver pennies). This may have been partly in response to the need to buy off the Vikings, and as a way of processing the large amount of bullion amassed during the Viking wars. In the tenth century most of the new towns created as forts over the area conquered by Wessex (=England) were provided with mints, to enable the crown to distribute wealth to friends, servants and enemies. Only in the eleventh century, as imported pottery finally returned to Britain, were these pennies able to serve a monetary economy.
As a coda, Professor Carver will raise some questions on ‘personhood’. How far was wealth apportioned between men and women? How far was it measured by access to food? How far was it inherited? As well as the existing methods of osteology, archaeozoology and archaeobotany, new techniques such as stable isotope analysis and DNA are being mobilized to address these questions.